Prague in May
You know you have started to settle into a new place when you go away for the first time, and when you return it feels like coming home. When we were settled in Budapest, our first trip abroad was to Prague.
I had considered Paris, the “Budapest of the West” as I liked to joke, since Budapest was so often described as the “Paris of East”. But in the end, I chose Prague.
The Czech capital had many romantic associations for me – I’d even had fantasies of living there – so I was keen to show Vitaly the “golden city of a hundred spires”. And what better time to go than in the lovely month of May? I surprised him with train tickets and a booking for a nice little Airbnb, right in the centre of the Old Town.
Vitaly was not much of a traveller but he seemed excited when we set off on the České dráhy train that takes seven hours to go from Budapest to Prague. Through the window, we watched the landscape change from the flat fields of Hungary and Slovakia to the wooded and hillier countryside of Moravia and Bohemia. We ate a picnic of bread and boiled eggs and looked forward to a stout dinner in Prague.
When we arrived, the weather was far from spring-like; in fact it was atrocious. As we walked to the Charles Bridge in the early evening, the sky was the colour of a bruise, and it was snowing. This did not stop the tourists, who surged through the narrow streets, umbrellas clashing, and stood on the bridge, packed like sardines. For I am talking about a May before the coronavirus closed the borders; a May when there was a plague of tourists.
“Is this it then, the magical city ?” asked Vitaly.
Through the crowds, a procession of churchgoers was approaching. They were carrying a wooden saint, like an Indian god in a curtained palanquin. Were they about to tip the carving into the Vltava River? We watched, fascinated and appalled in equal measure.
Well, Vitaly was appalled. “How medieval,” he said. I was fascinated because I realised the saint was John of Nepomuk, revered by Catholics for refusing to reveal the secrets of the Queen of Bohemia’s confession and punished by King Wenceslaus, who cast him into the river and left him to drown. Good King Wenceslas looked out… not such a good king after all, then.
I began a little cultural lecture. “Can we eat now?” said Vitaly.
“Sure,” I said.
But finding a place to dine turned out to be no easy matter. Every restaurant was heaving and there was not a free table to be found.
“I think I know where to go,” I said, remembering old haunts from Communist times, when Prague was much quieter. We went off the bridge and under it to a little square, where we found a half-empty bar that served dumplings and beer.
“This is delicious,” said Vitaly, “but a bit pricey, eh?”
Thus fortified, we walked back through the sleet to our apartment, passing the Astronomical Clock, the Old Town Square and the fabulous Gothic Týn Church. “It’s real Gothic,” I pointed out, “not like the 19th century mock Gothic stuff in Budapest.”
“Mmm,” said Vitaly. He was quite happy with the clean, modern Airbnb, so I didn’t burden him with the information that we were staying near the Powder Tower.
I should have known. Vitaly had often told me that he “didn’t like architecture”. Indeed, he described Prague as a “pile of bricks”. Given his aversion to fine old buildings, I must say he was quite patient, going with me up the hill the next day to St. Vitus Cathedral. He endured a little talk – I tried to keep it brief – about gargoyles and flying buttresses.
When we came down again, we finally found something that Vitaly loved – not the Franz Kafka Museum, because along with architecture he hates museums too – but rather the Piss statue by David Černý that stands outside. Two mechanical men with bronze penises urinate into a basin shaped like the map of the Czech Republic. Using an app, you can order the men to pee a message of your choice into the water. Vitaly was so taken by this that he made it the cover of his Facebook page.
The next day, he was leaving to go back to Budapest on his own, while I was staying on in Prague for a couple of days for work. I accompanied him to the station and when he got on the train and leaned out of the window to say goodbye, he had the happiest smile on his face. He looked like a person who was about to set off on the trip of a lifetime but he was in seventh heaven to be going back to Budapest.
When he got to Nyugati, he texted me: “Ah, the smell of Budapest, home at last.”
I was glad because for all its shabbiness and relative obscurity, Hungary was home. It had taken us a trip to Prague to realise that.